Acute Diarrhea and Zinc Deficiency in Children under 5 Years in Morocco: Case-Control Study

In Morocco, zinc is currently available in primary health care, but it is not prescribed and there is no clue about the prevalence of zinc deficiency in children under five years of age. The objectives of this work were to establish the incidence of zinc deficiency and to analyze his association with acute diarrhea in children under five years of age. It was a prospective case-control study, over a period of two months, realized in the pediatric emergency department. We included those aged from one month to five years. The data was collected using a pre-established form and analyzed by the SPSS software.V.16. We included 210 children, 70 in the acute diarrhea group and 140 in the control group. The median age was 25.8 months with a slight male predominance (sex-ratio=1.2). The incidence of zinc deficiency was 30.95%. The predictive factors for zinc deficiency after multivariate analysis and logistic regression were acute diarrhea, dehydration, presence of previous diarrheal episodes, vomiting, and stool counts. From this, it can be said that zinc deficiency is frequent in Moroccan children aged from one month to five years and a factor exposing to acute diarrhea. We recommend the systematic prescription of zinc for any child with acute diarrhea.